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Posts by Randy A. Simes

Randy is an award-winning urban planner who founded UrbanCincy in May 2007. He grew up on Cincinnati’s west side in Covedale, and graduated from the University of Cincinnati’s nationally acclaimed School of Planning in June 2009. In addition to maintaining ownership and serving as the managing editor for UrbanCincy, Randy has worked professionally as a planning consultant throughout the United States, Korea and the Middle East. After brief stints in Atlanta and Chicago, he currently lives in the Daechi neighborhood of Seoul’s Gangnam district. Contact him at randy.simes@urbancincy.com or follow him on Twitter @RandySimes.

Following committee approval yesterday, City Council appears poised to approve a $7.3 million financial package that should bring a 130-unit North American Properties project to reality.

Designed by John Senhauser Architects, the $52 million, 15-story residential tower will accelerate the transformation of the northeastern corner of the central business district, where business leaders have been trying to rebrand it as the Eighth Street Design District for its cluster of design agencies.

As City Hall has done in the past, 3CDC will be used to build and operate a 500-space public parking garage, along with 10,000 square feet of commercial space, which is estimated to account for $16.5 million of the total project cost.

Eighth and Sycamore Tower [John Senhauser Architects]

Eighth and Sycamore Tower [John Senhauser Architects]

The project was first announced two years ago, and will take the place of the former two-story Red Cross building at the southeast corner of Eighth and Sycamore Street.

While the parking garage seems oversized at face value, it is part of a larger development efforts taking place nearby, including a 115-room Holiday Inn that includes no parking at all. As part of that deal, the City of Cincinnati agreed to build a parking garage that would provide 120 spaces. Originally planned to include 610 parking spaces, the new parking garage will support both developments and replaces an aging public garage that once occupied the site.

The relatively quick procession of this project stands in contrast to the 111-unit residential tower North American Properties recently completed called Seven at Broadway. Unlike this yet-to-be-named project, Seven at Broadway took more than a decade to complete, with an above-ground parking garage occupying the site since 2003.

The apartments at Seven at Broadway are some of the priciest in the city, and were pre-leased at a pace that surprised developers and investors. Price points have not yet been identified for this new project.

GE Tower Concept at SW Corner of 8th/Sycamore [WLWT]

The completion of the Holiday Inn and this new residential tower will significantly alter this corner of downtown, but many still view the two large surface lots across Sycamore Street as the final major pieces of the puzzle.

The southern of the two lots is controlled by St. Xavier Church, and the northern lot is owned by Columbia Oldsmobile Company.

When General Electric was searching for a site for their new Global Operations Center, which ultimately located at The Banks, a rendering surfaced that showed an office building for GE on the northern of the two lots. Rumors have once again begun circulating online that the mockups might be or could be related to potential corporate offices for General Electric should they take action on their relocation threats to the State of Connecticut.

The full City Council will vote on this financial package on Wednesday

Cincinnati make an unlikely bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics. The Queen City lost out to a number of other American cities that became the finalists for the U.S. selection, which ultimately put New York City in the running against a host of global competitors. Those days of heated competition to host the games, however, may be over. More from CityLab:

If the U.S. bid had gone to D.C., San Francisco, or Los Angeles, critics would have rallied against the Games in those cities the same way they did in Boston. Support for the Games was bound to fall in the wake of an actual bid, as critics sought to expose the high costs or unpractical plans that usually attach themselves to these mega-events.

I don’t see how a U.S. city will ever again host the Olympic Games. Or a World Cup, for that matter. (We’re stuck with the Super Bowl, though.) While mega-events could help cities in Western nation accomplish good things, the participation of authoritarian states is driving the Olympics and the World Cup toward extreme costs and extravagance.

Area transit riders can now download a new app called Bus Detective that offers real-time arrival information for Metro bus service.

Developed by locally based Gaslight, the app is free and available for download on Android and iOS devices. The data has also been packaged so that it can be accessed on the web at www.busdetective.com.

For years the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority had been reluctant, like many other transit operators throughout the nation, to open up their data to the public. But just four months after opening the data, the region’s largest transit agency is now the beneficiary of a free real-time bus tracking app.

“It’s all about convenience. Our customers want to know when their bus is coming, real-time,” says Metro CEO Dwight Ferrell. “Smartphones are everywhere, and transit apps like Bus Detective make transit even easier to use.”
The city’s burgeoning tech community had been calling for local leaders to open more data. So far 2015 has proven to be a watershed moment for such actions, particularly so with the launch of Open Data Cincy.

“We’re huge fans of open data and turning that information into something valuable for the public,” says Chris Moore, CEO of Gaslight. “We also love public transportation and hope the app encourages more people to ride the bus.”

A query of the App Store reveals that Cincinnati may be the first transit agency in Ohio with its own custom real-time tracking application; however, both Cincinnati and Cleveland also have had Transit Tracker – an app that has been tailored to more than 30 cities nationwide – since 2014.

Both applications are free to use, but Transit Tracker can be used on the Apple Watch if users purchase an in-app upgrade. It also offers limited interoperability with TANK and Cincy Red Bike.

While Bus Detective has been available for more than two weeks, it officially launched today.

“The Bus Detective app is a great example of the talent and creativity within our community and is helping make catching the bus even easier for the thousands of customers who rely on our service every day,” said Ferrell.

The app is relatively simple to use. Users just need to download the app and then search for their stop by a specific street address or the closest stop to their current location. From there users are presented with the arrival information for the next several buses, and can save specific stops as favorites for quicker reference in the future.

While the app offers clear bus tracking information, it does not allow users to map their trips. This much more complicated function is best carried out by using GoogleMaps, which Metro was added to in 2011 after the agency opened their data to the tech giant.

The Bus Detective launch event will continue on Fountain Square today until 1pm. Those who attend will be able to learn more about the app, while also having the opportunity to win prizes and take selfies with a full-size, sleuthy Metro buses.

The $86 million renovation and expansion of the University of Cincinnati’s historic Nippert Stadium is nearly complete.

According to project officials, the work is expected to be complete in time for the Bearcats to host their first game back on campus – after a year away at Paul Brown Stadium – in three months.

The latest project video update reveals that virtually all exterior work is now complete, and that crews are now focused on interior finishings, along with some exterior facade treatments. They also note that the dramatic roll-open windows on the press boxes will soon go in, along with the ribbon scoreboards on both the east and west sides of the 114-year-old stadium.

Designed by New York-based Architecture Research Office and Heery International, the modern architectural style continues a trend on UC’s main campus of blending contemporary with historic designs. The large glass facade on the back side of the western concourse will, perhaps, serve as the best example of this as it looms over the historic, yet modern Tangeman University Center and internationally acclaimed UC Main Street.

The new Nippert Stadium will have an increased seating capacity of 40,000, and boast luxury boxes, press suites, new lounges, and a sorely needed expanded offering of restrooms and concessions stalls.

Originally projected to cost between $80-85 million, University officials say that the $86 million project is being funded through private donations and premium seat revenues.

These numbers can be misleading, and often don’t even pass the smell test.

Is Jacksonville, for example, really a bigger city than Detroit, Washington DC, Atlanta and Boston? Or out west, would most people actually consider Phoenix to be a larger city than San Francisco, Seattle, Denver or San Diego? Of course not.

Yes, Boston is actually a bigger city than Indianapolis [Emmanuel Huybrechts, Flickr]

No, Indianapolis is not bigger than Washington DC or Atlanta. [Serge Melki, Flickr]

In both scenarios, however, that is precisely the case. That is because the municipal boundaries for Jacksonville (885 square miles) and Phoenix (517 square miles) are disproportionately large compared to the population of their city. Closer to home the same is true for Columbus (223 square miles), Indianapolis (368 square miles) and Charlotte (298 square miles) – all of which skew the average population density for cities east of the Mississippi downward due to their huge municipal footprints.

If you were to simply pick-up a daily newspaper and read the listing of America’s most populated cities, you would not get this full perspective and perhaps be misled to think that Columbus is the biggest city in Ohio, or that Indianapolis is the fifth largest city east of the Mississippi River.

Using this same practice, some might consider Cincinnati to be a small city that doesn’t even crack the top 30 in the United States.

Of course, we know all of this is skewed by all sorts of factors. Some cities sit on state or county lines, others follow historical boundaries from hundreds of years ago that have never changed, while other are granted more liberal annexation capabilities. In short, it’s politics.

Now if we were to look at America’s 30 most populous cities again, but rank them by population density instead of overall population, the picture would change rather dramatically. Most cities in the west fall considerably, while older cities in the east would rise. The outliers that have artificially inflated their boundaries over the years also fall into a more normalized position on the chart.

While Cincinnati is not in the top 30 in terms of population, we considered it anyways since this is UrbanCincy after all. After adjusting for population density, Cincinnati would vault all the way to the 16th “biggest” city in America, just behind Denver and ahead of Dallas. This is also more in line with Cincinnati’s metropolitan population ranking that falls within the top 30 in America.

Those cities in this analysis that are in the east have an average population density, outliers included, of 6,579 people per square mile, while those in the west, come in at 3,804 people per square mile.

If outliers like Jacksonville actually were as large as they project, and followed the average population density for the region, it would need to add close to 5 million people. Likewise, Indianapolis would need to add around 1.6 million people and Charlotte 1.1 million. Local politics and market conditions in each of these cities will never allow for this many new people to move within city limits.